New DuckTales Animated Series

How do you mean, we didn't know? Of course she was going to be alive. There was absolutely NO way that the show was teasing Della Duck at the start, only to then end up going "sorry guys, she's dead after all". That was NEVER going to happen. Not on this show, despite all pretensions of serious drama.

I mean, I am honestly surprised Della ACTUALLY lost a leg in this episode. A character actually got hurt, and it actually stuck. That never happened before.

Yes she was obviously going to be alive but we didnt even know how or when she went missing till the 2nd to last episode of season 1, and then in the last episode we saw she was still alive and wanting to reunite with her kids. The last episode was what 7 of season 2? it's not that drug out from when we found out where she was to finding out how and what shes been doing for 10ish years.

Like, I find the idea of everyone dealing with the fallout of the inevitable Della Returns storyline, to almost be more interesting than exploring why she was gone in the first place.

That’s getting into unfamiliar territory. No other adaptation of the Disney Duck universe (at least as far as I know), has dealt with what would happen if their mother ever came back. That would be a huge shift in the status quo, and would almost certainly change the family dynamic. (The show is a comedy, so it wouldn’t get too heavy, but it would be a huge shift in the dynamic, that we’ve never seen before.)

There was a lot of drama and feels in the end of last season because it was the end of the season and their season arcs were coming to a head. This is still early in second season. It's not going to be angst and regret every week.

The fact is you have a lot of Duck family relatives and they all basically live together, so bringing Della back and having her be a regular wouldn't, theoretically, change any of that. Della will be with the kids and will be living with Scrooge and Donald, and she'll adventure along them and Scrooge and Donald. So it would be additive and not subtractive. At best, Della might take screentime away from Mrs. Beakley but Mrs. Beakley is a supporting player. Maybe a little more time away from Donald but not too much and having Della and Donald bounce off one another would be fun to see. One thing that's clear from the last episode, Donald's insult of Dumbella...not totally inaccurate. Della's not all that smart or rather she thinks she's smarter than she is. And that makes an interesting contrast, since somehow she's ended up as a bigger loser than her brother...she's become a "deadbeat" mother, amputee, marooned on the moon thanks to her own joyride.

Usually when you have a long-lost relative and so on, the idea is that the minute they go back to that relative the story, in terms of the adventure plot, ends. But Della is an adventurer herself, she's not planning to retire anytime soon (she says in the last episode she plans on taking the boys to further adventurers herself) she takes the stories in an interesting direction by introducing cosmic touches and has a certain baggage. So a reunion would not end the stories as it was presumed to be the case in the Donald Duck comics. That's one advantage of the stories centered on Scrooge rather than Donald. In the comics the nephews stay with Donald and Donald is usually the protagonist so Della coming and the kids going to live with her, would change stuff. In the cartoons with everyone living at Scrooge's, that won't be a problem.

I think calling her a deadbeat is going a bit far. She did not strand herself on the moon on purpose. It was an accident due to her recklessness. It makes her a reckless adventurer, but not a bad mother. Let's get off this narrative that she was running away from her children, because that is clearly not the case.

Her returning should logically shake up the status quo, though. There is a reason parents are always absent when kids get involved in adventures. There is a reason Donald is their uncle, not their dad. It creates a distance between the child and parental figures, creating a space for adventure to happen. If a parent was involved in that adventure, the question of that parent's responsiblity for the safety of their kids would always be in the background, and it would either hamper the kid's ability to act independently in the adventure, or it would reflect rather poorly on the parent not looking after their kid.

This is, incidentally, why bringing Della into this show was, at it's core, a bad idea. Which is not to say they shouldn't have done it, mind you, but the writers sure have their work cut out for them working this idea out. As soon as Della and the nephews are reunited, parenting WILL become an issue for fans and critics alike, and the writers will have to wrestle with balancing parenting and adventurous freedom.

Taking kids on adventures as a parenting issue is a problem even when you have Scrooge and Donald. Them being uncles, or Beakley being granny to Webby, doesn't change that. I am sure that questions like this were asked and discussed and hashed out by Angones/Youngberg when they pitched this to Disney who are quite protective of their stuff. You have some amount of freedom with Scrooge since he's a Carl Barks character and not a Walt Disney one but Donald and the triplets are Walt Disney cartoon pantheon figures, so any changes like this would have been considered carefully. Disney has been open to reimagining, like Quack Pack where they aged the triplets to teenagers was a major deviation and change but even there the question of the mother wasn't discussed and so on. And I wonder if they might do that...like say by season 3 they go to Season 4 with teenage versions of the triplets, having them progress naturally.

I don't see how you can resolve the Della story and not have her return to the cast. She can't die...and I don't see them going that way, if that was the case they would never have mentioned her. She can't reunite and then pull And Now I Must Go which I think most would see as a cop-out, and it's certainly not how the story is being built up so far.

I don't see how, either. It would be an astronomical cop-out to have her go And Now I Must Leave. But then again, they DID axe Lena, even though she is a fan favorite. I know she is going to return somehow, but since that hasn't happened in the early episodes yet, I highly suspect they spent the hiatus rewriting some stuff after realizing just how unpopular her death was going to be.

I think the uncle thing is a bit of a cultural relic, from a time when it was felt that it was okay for an uncle to be less responsible for the kids under his care than a parent. A former editor in chief of Donald Duck magazine once tried to resolve it by suggesting that Donald was more like a teenager, and should be regarded like their brother more than their uncle. Suffive it to say that no one was buying that.

Edit: I was watching Linkara's review of Darkwing Duck, which reminds me that we DO have one excellent example of how to deal with the combination of parenting and adventure stories.

One direction things could go was an idea I'd had for a story of my own, albeit inspired by Della:

Della could be forced to retire, either due to a Career-Ending Injury (unlikely if amputation barely slowed her down), recuperation (she has spent ten-plus years in a low gravity environment, she may need a re-adjustment period on returning to Earth), Anger Born of Worry from the rest of the family (they hound her into it because of how nearly/much they lost her already) or even her own decision (this whole experience makes her reevaluate her priorities), or any other plausible response you want to tack on.

For someone like Della, that would be no small adjustment, even if it's self-imposed, and can create a plotline or two all on its own.

Plus, remember how in Eragon everyone cries "a single tear"? Yeah, just try that with One Piece and see if it works

I'm not sure I like that idea. I feel we already got enough moping and angsting about adventures going bad and responsibility from Donald, we don't need another go with Della. Such broodiness can get overindulgent pretty quick.

Doesn't necessarily need to be Played for Drama. Especially if its Della's choice. There's plenty of comedy to be had, at least an episode's worth, in Della trying to be a "regular" mom and being clearly ill & suited to it.

That said, I do concede that my own story idea goes the angsty route.

Edited by sgamer82 on Mar 12th 2019 at 10:36:19 AM

Plus, remember how in Eragon everyone cries "a single tear"? Yeah, just try that with One Piece and see if it works

The show called it a cosmic storm, I think, which does not make it better. Yeah, it is basically a thunder storm in space, and yeah, it IS pretty silly even for the sillier comics.

It strikes me as a bit curious how places on earth, like the jungle and deep sea, are always treated with relative realism, while space is often given over to this sort of nonsense. Not just in Ducktales, but in many other shows. You don't get seaweed forest fires on the sea floor, but you DO get a thunderstorm in space.

I think there's a lot of stuff a returned Della can do. For one thing, it's going to question everything that Donald believed in and had taken for granted and accepted as his lot of life...and that's a lot of dramatic stuff there. And for Scrooge too. And Della will have to compete and handle the fact that her triplets have mixed emotions about her. Della as the pilot will also compete with Launchpad, and but heads with Beakley and Webby since both of them filled a certain void in the triplets lives that Della will now take over. This would be a good place to introduce Daisy, since Donald dating Daisy and thinking of something with her, or doing stuff with the Three Cabs and Paperinik would be easier to sell with Della around to look after the kids. He can have some much needed "me" time after devoting an entire decade of his life and basically his youth looking after those kids (which he did with love and affection of course but it was still something he was giving up).

Even if you do Status Quo Is God by the end of the season 3, at least a season and a half worth of stuff with Della around as a status-quo could be teased and explored if only to tease to readers "could be this" until the Snap Back.

I think any mixed feelings have a good chance of evaporating VERY quickly. Remember how fast the conflict over Dewey keeping his search for Della secret was resolved. It didn't even make it past the same scene it got started in.

This show invokes high drama, but consistently goes for clean and easy resolutions.

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